Seventh Annual Workshop on Space Operations Applications and Research (SOAR 1993), volume 1

This document contains papers presented at the Space Operations, Applications and Research Symposium (SOAR) Symposium hosted by NASA/Johnson Space Center (JSC) on August 3-5, 1993, and held at JSC Gilruth Recreation Center. SOAR included NASA and USAF programmatic overview, plenary session, panel discussions, panel sessions, and exhibits. It invited technical papers in support of U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Department of Energy, NASA, and USAF programs in the following areas: robotics and telepresence, automation and intelligent systems, human factors, life support, and space maintenance and servicing. SOAR was concerned with Government-sponsored research and development relevant to aerospace operations. More than 100 technical papers, 17 exhibits, a plenary session, several panel discussions, and several keynote speeches were included in SOAR '93

The Generality Of Overgenerality

Several recent papers [ Cohen, 1990c; Flann and Dietterich, 1989 ] have presented learning systems that use, as background knowledge, an initial domain theory that is overgeneral: that is, a theory that defines a concept that is a superset of the concept to be learned. Learning then becomes a problem of specializing the initial theory. Such an overgeneral theory is, of course, only one of many possible ways in which background knowledge can be used in learning. This paper argues that many different types background knowledge can expressed as overgeneral theories, albeit overgeneral theories of a somewhat artificial nature. A consequence of this is that theory specialization techniques are suprisingly general: in particular, we will argue that many different types of learning tasks involving background knowledge can be solved using existing theory specialization techniques. Keywords: Theory specialization Length: 3690 words Preference: general presentation Submitted to IMLW-91 1 Int..